The benefits of my distributors are:
1) they are completely taken apart, cleaned and retoleranced (i.e. proper bushing tolerences between the shaft and bushings)...whcih is a crap shoot with a reman unit.
2) I reuse the OEM body which allows the cap to fit right and is not a crappy pot metal body that is not cast so nicely.
3) I lube the moving parts properly, Cardone leaves the distributor parts dry which can prematurely wear the mainshaft bushing, and allow the advacne plate to "grab" on occasion not allowing for a smooth ignition advance when the vacuum pod is used for economy.
4) New Vacuum pod, with a known part number and a known advance so it can be adjusted if needed.
5) In this case I also used a short slot governor for points (11.5), so more initial advance can be dialed.
6) Springs were chosen to be a bit more aggressive than the stock heavy springs...so you get a little more power, better mpg in most cases...so better than factory.
7) You get paperwork that tells you what I did to the distributor, a chart that shows the mechanical and vacuum advance and part numbers if applicable so you know what is in the distributor...and on the back page you get an advance vs. rpm so you know what the advance looks like.
You get a recommendation on where to set the initial, and how far you might be able to work the advance up to to gain best numbers based on our culminated data on the board and from daily driving....
9) In this case I also put new points, condensor, gear, and contacts in as well, and checked the dwell dynamically in my sun distributor machine. I typically set the contacts and put a piece of paper from the contacts box in between the contacts so they don't wear or rub during shipping...they might come out of adjustment if the shipping company tossed it around like a football during shipping...
So it is a very "known" quantity compared to buying a reman over the counter...
The only downside to this is that we didn't have time to recurve it specifically for her car and power train. This one was one of my last two recurves when I was doing recurves for board members, and I set it up somewhat generically in case someone needed one (not many people want points distributors these days since EI is the way to go...and junkyards ran out of EI cores to modify, recurve and refurbish so it killed my small hobby business...but there are about 35 of my EI distributors, about 10 of my points, and 2 small block distributors out in the market.
Worked on stock, economy, race, and turbo curves.... Hopefully when I get my shop in order and power out there I can get back to offering this service again...
The adjustment plate is stock, I would start in the center of the slot so you have even chance of adjusting it.
I would set the balancer if it is accurate at TDC to start with (confirm TDC on the damper is really correct...by checking piston depth with a tool and confirming that both rockers on #1 are loose/ on the base circle of the cam) and I would use an old distributor cap with a hole drilled between the central tower and the #1 plug wire post...install rotor and cap, and install distributor so that the rotor lines up with the #1 tower as seen through the hole in the cap... The engine if in good shape should fire off if all is well, but may not run best as the distributor is set for the initial to be set at 5-8 BTDC...if you can get it running (and timing chain hasn't jumped a tooth, or lash is out of spec), I would loosen the set screw so the distributor can be advanced to the 5-8 BTDC range, if tuning with a vacuum gauge you should see improvements in the reading... sometimes more advance and or improvements in vacuum and timing can require changes to the base settings on the carburator, and or jetting since we are improving on the mediocre setting the factory required when the vehicle was originally manufactured.
-D.Idiot
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